Preface

Baxandall, Michael

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Preface

Michael Baxandall

Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

There is nothing to gain by making an argument here that modern art criticism begins in the Italian Renaissance. The issue would become too much a matter of quite what one chooses the properties of modern art criticism to be. Depending on this choice, equally strong or stronger cases could be made for, say, eighteenth-century or late nineteenth-century France. Yet no one who has thought about it at all would doubt that deep in modern ways of thinking about art, down in the intellectual substance …

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00179.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13446

Preface

There is nothing to gain by making an argument here that modern art criticism begins in the Italian Renaissance. The issue would become too much a matter of quite what one chooses the properties of modern art criticism to be. Depending on this choice, equally strong or stronger cases could be made for, say, eighteenth-century or late nineteenth-century France. Yet no one who has thought about it at all would doubt that deep in modern ways of thinking about art, down in the intellectual substance of Artforum as well as The Burlington Magazine, there are some active Renaissance elements; or at least that in Renaissance art criticism some energetic elements of any art criticism are helpfully exposed. To attend to this is not just propaedeutic to looking at Renaissance art.

What actually happened between 1300 and 1550 — between, say, Dante’s remarking that Giotto had replaced Cimabue in having ‘the cry’ (Purgatorio XI.94–96) and Vasari’s majestic Lives of the Artists — is still a little mysterious. How could the parvenu art criticism have overtaken the ancient refinements of literary criticism, academically installed in the genre of Commentary-Lecture as these were? What forced such quick development of such a coercive institution?

There are various part-answers to these questions. One is that art criticism, precisely because it was not installed in the schools, was freer than literary criticism to graze in varied worlds, including rich demotic worlds: workshop argot and passeggiata gossip, manners and mathematics, anecdotes and philosophical aesthetics, humanist literary rhetoric and classical art criticism itself, were all elements in the mix.

Another part-answer is that in the situation of art criticism there was more real urgency about evaluation. To decide whether or not Petrarch was better than Dante did not entail forgoing any work by either: but a decision that Ghiberti was better than Brunelleschi, or Botticelli better than Filippino Lippi, could sometimes mean that a work by one of them would never be realized at all.

There are other conditions too, connected with the fashion for discursive dialogue, cultivation of the vernacular, cultural aspirations of artists, accumulation of art in newly large houses, legitimation of display, and more. But explanation is incomplete, and it will not be attempted here.

The seven papers in this book are not all about art criticism, in fact. What they all are about is words ‘for’ art, in some sense — words directed towards, or in representation of, or on behalf of, or as a basis for, or occasionally in place of the art. The papers are printed in the order of writing, except for the first two, which were assembled or adapted for the volume. The earliest was published in 1963 and the last was written in 2001 so it would be absurd to claim that they are product of a coherent campaign. On the other hand, I have tried to balance the volume to embody something like an argument. The argument would not suppose that Renaissance art criticism was wholly benign. The capacity of criticism to establish and elaborate itself so much within its own universe seems to me disquieting.

Paper 1, the introductory ‘Prolegomena’, takes three main texts to block in a view of what is most powerful and basic in the criticism between the early mid-fifteenth and beginning sixteenth centuries. (The book revolves around Italy, 1435–1510; and I take ‘criticism’ here in a broad sense of discriminating comment on either individual performance or pictures in general.) Other people would have other views about this and it may be best simply to say the sketch is stipulative: this is what I shall be referring to as Renaissance art criticism.

Paper 2, ‘Alberti’s Cast of Mind’, is a short conjecture about the sort of person the astonishing Alberti, who keeps turning up in the papers, was. It is an occasional piece but a principle it involves — the location of sources does not constitute an account of causes — seems important in study of the Renaissance, a partly neoclassical culture.

Paper 3, ‘Angelo Decembrio’s De politia litteraria, Part LXVIII’, retrieved a text. The text is a case of art cropping up as a topic in a highly formalized mode of general conversation. That used to seem to me to diminish its density but now it seems its interest. There is a glimpse here of how some Renaissance people talked about art.

Paper 4, ‘Rudolph Agricola on Art and on Patrons’, describes an initial moment of diffusion of the new criticism from Italy northwards and to our own culture. It ends with Agricola’s peculiar theorization of patronage, which can perhaps usefully disrupt our own.

Paper 5, ‘English Disegno’, a later stage of this diffusion northwards, is about deracination of the word disegno in Renaissance England. The anglophone world is still living with the consequences of this black comedy, but it also reflects back on the virtuosity native language-users can sustain in using complex words.

Paper 6, ‘Sadoleto’s Laocoon’, overdue business, examines the most celebrated Renaissance description of a work of art with a view particularly to what a description of an image can be supposed actually to describe; and since the object of this description is sculpture the issues turn on general visual antecedents of the pictorial.

Paper 7, ‘Piero della Francesca’s The Resurrection of Christ’, finally, moves to the object of criticism. This long paper is not a critical essay but an attempt to establish an instance of the visual conditions of a pictorial meaning — a sort of pictorial antipode to language. In attempting this (with language, of course) the paper may be found to be making tediously heavy weather of quite obvious features of the picture — as, if taken as a critical essay, it would be doing. I am more sensitive to the worry that to write at such length about one picture, even digressively, may deform attention to it. Here I would say that a good painting of the very deliberated kind of the Resurrection is resilient: that no one is going to fatigue it for long; and that, besides, to flit from work to work plucking a point here, a point there, can soon become destructive too.

All the papers work to very restricted cases. With this sort of matter only a worked particular really represents anything, I think: synthesis with the ambition of being systematic and comprehensive just pulps what should have been filleted or quartered. Thus allegiance here to individual studies of ‘the poised and resonating instance’, between which readers may make their own way.

A collection of pieces taken from such a long period makes adequate general acknowledgements impractical since they would approach an autobiography. Particular acknowledgements of advice and information appear in individual papers.

But I note that in 1963, at the beginning of the paper that is here Chapter 3, I thanked E. H. Gombrich and J. B. Trapp for their help. I still do, and this is a place to say so with more general force. Sir Ernst Gombrich was then supervisor of my research and is the art historian by whom I have been the most influenced, of choice. J. B. Trapp was the tactful editor of all my earlier published work and still represents in my mind the specifically constructive scruple. Both gave me materials, ideas and support over a long period. They were successive directors of the Warburg Institute in the University of London while I was on its staff and, whatever their feelings about it, the work in this book would not have been done but for them and the Institute.

Svetlana Alpers and Michael Podro read and commented on the complete draft and I am grateful for their criticism, as ever. Tom Baxandall produced diagrams to awkward specifications, and I am grateful to him too.

At the Yale University Press in London I owe thanks to a number of people. Antony Wood edited the manuscript. Sandy Chapman collected illustration material. John Nicoll continued support that goes back thirty years. Gillian Malpass realized the book — the fourth we have worked on together. I am grateful for the good will and skill with which she took it on, designed it and saw it through.

ORIGINAL PUBLICATION

Paper 1: not previously published.

Paper 2: ‘Alberti’s Self’, in Fenway Court, 1990–91, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Mass., 1992, pp. 31–36.

Paper 3: ‘A Dialogue on Art from the Court of Leonello d’Este: Angelo Decembrio’s De politia literaria Pars LXVIII’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXVI, 1963, pp. 304–26.

Paper 4: (i) ‘Rudolf Agricola and the Visual Arts’, in Intuition und Kunstwissenschaft: Festschrift für Hanns Swarzenski, Berlin, 1973, pp. 409–18, and (ii) ‘Rudolph Agricola on Patrons Efficient and Patrons Final: a Renaissance Discrimination’, Burlington Magazine (A Tribute to Terence Hodgkinson), CXXIV, 1983, pp. 424–25.

Paper 5: ‘English Disegno’, in England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp, ed. Peter Mack and Edward Chaney, London, 1990, pp. 203–14. (Reprinted courtesy of Boydell Press.)

Papers 6 and 7: not previously published.

In Paper 2 I have minimally referenced and retouched but not attempted to make more formal a basically informal piece. In Paper 3 some unnecessary and wordy passages in the introduction have been cut, the transcription regularized and the translation modified here and there. Paper 4 is a composite of two shorter papers and involved cutting and reordering. Paper 5 is almost as originally published.

Square brackets in the notes indicate additions of literature that has appeared since original publication. I have done this sparingly, citing only references of exceptional interest, highly specific to the case, themselves providing fuller up-to-date bibliography. In particular, in Paper 3 I have not attempted to cover the last forty years’ work on Leonello d’Este’s Ferrara.

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